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Back in 2004 things were booming and, if you knew what you were doing, you could get a job in a place like NY making $125 k right out of law school. That went up to about $160 k over the next 3-4 years. firms raised rates every year. Junior associates were billing $200-$300 an hour and partners were billing $700 plus.

Meanwhile, Universities figured out years ago that law schools are very good income sources and they stated pumping out law students at an incredible rate, far faster than the rate of growth.

Then the financial collapse of 2008 hit us. Firms lost entire sections of business, e.g. sub-prime mortgages. They also lost entire large clients. If you were in bankruptcy and a few other areas you were OK, but over all everyone took a hit. At the same time, companies didn't want to pay the high rates any more and competition became fierce as work dried up.

Lawyers got laid off in the thousands between 2008-2010 and now you have a ton of people fresh out of law school with no where to go. People are taking jobs for $35 k a year doing personal injury. Of course, the folks from top schools are still able to find work but overall, it's very tough if you don't know anyone.

Of course, if you're smart, hard-working and patient you can spend 10-15 years in the trenches and build a business, but most people out of law school have no idea how to do that. Three years of reading case law doesn't prepare you for that.

I don't think its not so much that they don't know how to run a business, I think its more because they have no access to capital and student loan payments over $1000 a month that keep them from being able to risk starting their own business.

law school really doesn't teach a lot of valuable skills that young lawyers need to make it in the real world.

Including, but not limited to, how to be a lawyer. If there was a school that had an apprentice program I would recommend people do that. Even doing as many practicums, etc. as I could I had no idea how to lawyer.

You have Set 1 of things {X, Y, Z}. You have Set 2 of things {X}. Both of those sets satisfy 'including X.' But only Set 1 satisfies 'including, but not limited to, X.'

By stating 'including, but not limited to, X' it says that the set includes X but may also include other things. If you say 'including X' the set could be{X, Y, Z} but it could also be simply {X}. The 'but not limited to' allows for there to be other things beyond the one you are stating.

For me, it is a habit left from an especially anal professor of formal logic.

"Inter alia" is my favorite Latin term used in the law. Few people know what it means and therefore its usage almost always prompts the uninformed listener (or, the mark) to ask. This opens the window for the speaker to demonstrate their superior knowledge of all things trivial and esoteric. No other phrase is better evidence of the stereotypical pretentious attorney.

I agree with you - it is extraneous most of the time. Like I said, it is a habit left over from my mathematics and formal logic classes (I even use the phrase when talking - with many eye rolls from my wife).

Everyone says "including but not limited to", if you just say "including" a judge might find there was a reason you chose the non-standard language. Grammatically the word "including" has the exact same meaning with or without the "but not limited to", but why be a pioneer for no reason.

Law school teaches you analytical thinking so that you know how to think as a lawyer. Thinking like a lawyer and functioning like one are completely different. It's a shame that both aren't taught in Law Schools.

but if you have an undergraduate degree you should already know how to think analytically.

Sadly, this is definitely not the case. I think that law school should be 1-2 years of class and then 1.5-2 years of apprenticeship - that would be the best solution since you would learn how to read a case in class and then learn how to actually lawyer in the apprenticeship.

Nothing is stopping law students from getting some real experience while in school. Here in DC all the schools have part time programs, and at least the patent firms offer "student associate" positions (maybe 1500 billable hours a year). Great experience.

You need almost zero capital to start a law firm. There are no goods to buy, you don't need office space, you probably should have insurance but many don't. You may not make much at first but itbeats twiddling your thumbs.

Exactly. Aren't these databases just for looking at precedents and such? Sure, if you're working on a complicated or novel case you'll need them, but there's reason a new lawyer has to do that. Just stick to simple, clear cut cases. If anyone comes to you with a case that requires more complicated analysis, refer them to someone with those resources and pocket a nice referral fee.

Even with "simple" cases you need to make sure you are correctly applying the discovery rules and the law. Every case should involve some time reviewing the authorities, if only to confirm the applicable law did not change while you weren't looking.

Here in Texas, all state statutes are available (without annotation) online, and the mandatory State Bar membership includes "free" access to a searchable case-law database which is not as good as Westlaw or Lexis, but is not terrible, either. Plus, you can use a local law school's library, and your bar association or local government may have a public law library as well.

Thus, you don't have to subscribe to Lexis or Westlaw to start a practice. hamhead is right that the capital requirements are very low. You need office supplies and business cards. You might even rent a "virtual office" if you want to spend the money, but that's not essential.

Ok, that makes sense. By simple cases, I would mean something that doesn't require extensive or novel interpretations of the law, or anything obscure. You would probably be better at thinking of such cases than I would, but I'm thinking boilerplate stuff like legal name changes, typical personal bankruptcy cases, maybe simple traffic court cases. That kind of thing. You're not trying to make a grand case challenging the constitutionality of some law. You're not fighting a multi-million dollar patent suit involving esoteric patents from two megacorps. You're not fight a super-contentious divorce custody case. You're just doing the basic legal services that the average citizen would need.

Of course, but then you need the books (unless you have a very well maintained law library at your disposal either at a local law school, assuming they let you use it, or the courthouse, goodluck.) and somewhere to keep them. Get prepared to lose cases since its hard to shepardize until the new edition comes out. Also prepare to lose clients when it takes you 4x as long to prepare a case. Law firms obviously existed before electronic legal research, but that was when nobody had access to it. Now you're playing from behind.

It is certainly harder to practice without a subscription to Westlaw or Lexis, but it is still quite practical to do so. When you are just starting, you have more time than money or clients. So yeah, you can't bill for all the extra time you had to spend on research, but you can still bill something. If you have so many clients that you cannot keep up with all your research needs, then you have enough clients to afford Westlaw or Lexis. We are talking about starters who aren't there yet.

I strongly disagree. As a licensed professional, I am never unemployed. At worst, I am involuntarily self-employed. Some choose self-employment, but in this market many have it thrust upon them.

Self-employment is the default, without regard to my cash-flow needs or resources. If I am a litigator without a paying job, then I absolutely should be going solo rather than sit around doing nothing, even if I have no (or insufficient) cash-flow to pay for a subscription. There are perfectly adequate alternatives to a Lexis or Westlaw subscription, including local law school libraries, the local bar association library, the Texas State Bar's free (for Texas lawyers) subscription to Casemaker 2.2, Google scholar, Cornell's online law resources, etc.

well, considering my comment came in the context of a suggestion of opening an office-less, insurance-less law firm, I think proposing a westlaw/lexis-less law firm was fair game. But, point conceded, you can't operate a "real" law firm without any of those things.

Actually, I agree with your assessment of the other things. If you are just starting out, and are a solo, you definitely shouldn't invest in office space, etc. My impression is that some access to electronic research is now necessary for all attorneys (but not necessarily Westlaw or Lexis). However, I am not a solo, so maybe another person with more solo experience can chime in.

I agree, it's better than nothing but if you have $1 K in student loans a month it's tough to start on your own when you might not make anything for some period of time as you build up a book of business.

I suppose if you have no assets you can run without insurance, but if you have no assets how are you going to live until your cases start bringing in money? More importantly, how are you going to get clients, go door-to-door? Most likely, either you socialize to meet clients or you are advertising. Both are expensive, unlikely to be successful for a brand new grad, and without clients you really are twiddling your thumbs.
You will either need a court run service or a lot of gas and free time to personally do your own filings. You will need money to advance costs unless you are extremely diligent about obtaining costs up front from clients, and insisting on money up front may scare off clients if you are still wet behind the ears and too cheap to even rent an office.

Bottom line, if you really don't have enough money to cover things like insurance, office rent, and online research, starting a successful firm is nearly impossible. You are better off taking the $35k PI job for a few years until you can afford it, and then have a chance at actually persuading someone to use your services once you have some familiarity with practicing law. I have too many friends that can't pay their bills because starting their own firm seemed easier than a job search.

Malpractice insurance around here for a sole practitioner that's brand new and doesn't have an assistant double-checking the calendaring would be close to $10k a year.

Maybe I'm just not enough of a social butterfly to have that many
litigious friends and family, but that's what I mean by "paying to socialize." You aren't going to convince Aunt Mabel to sue the doctor that set her hip wrong unless you come to her birthday party, and bring a nice bottle of wine. Friends aren't going to realize that you are looking for clients unless you hang out with them. My point is, if you are on a ramen budget, it won't work.

Well your first year of practice is the cheapest E&O ever gets, since it's step raised for the first 5 years you have it with any one company. You're also talking full time policies. Even after 3 years on my own mine is only around $2k though (full time, $1MM/$1MM). When I was starting it was like $350 part time $100k/$300k. But it also depends what you're doing. I don't do any litigation.

Bad economy means people getting laid off. Lots of people laid off go back to school. This combined with law school being a catch all for lots of idiot undergrads who want to delay the real world. (Remember you can go to law school with any major) combined with the profit to be made by law schools off federally subsidized student loans means a bunch of law schools horribly misrepresent students chances at a lucrative career to make money for themselves.

Then as said before, the economy is down so there are fewer law jobs. More grads + fewer jobs = bad market

Even before the economy tanked the legal sector was handing out more law degrees than there were law jobs in most markets. The US Bar Association was extremely lax in certifying new law schools and in checking the self reported statistics from the law schools that formed the basis for their US News rankings.

Legal education in the US is not good career training. It is very hit or miss in terms of hiring at many schools. On campus recruiters will take the top students from top schools but all others must fend for themselves without any sort of structured hiring process. The most worrying trend of the recession was summer associates being told that their job offers would have to be deferred or in the worse cases not offered at all. The quid pro quo of qualifying and working as a summer associate is that if you do good work you get a job offer but for many that never happened. If you haven't got a job lined up after graduation and the bar exam then you are stuck. There needs to be more clerkship/externship opportunities that allow new attorneys to work right away but more importantly to get real legal experience on their resumes. Right now everything is a minimum of one year and more than likely 3-5 year post JD experience required.

There is a very predatory group of business known as "legal staffing". While they do provide temp jobs for unemployed attorneys the overall affect on the market is very bad. Combined with the overabundance of legal personnel they know they can pay the minimum hourly wage, demand weekend and long overtime work and not pay benefits. Most importantly is that firms like that once a case or project ends they can just let them all go again and rehire when needed.

As far as I know these problems are largely unique to the US legal market. The US needs far more regulations on how law schools are run and the US Bar Association needs to be an advocate for attorneys rather than big firms. They need to ensure fair pay, reasonable hours and job security. Ultimately it is the clients who will get screwed because a whole generation of attorneys is now missing out on the opportunity to do substantive legal work and learn for more experienced attorneys. Attorneys can't help clients when they can't help themselves.

"This combined with law school being a catch all for lots of idiot undergrads who want to delay the real world"

that pretty much sums it up. anyone can take the LSATs and go to law school and even the person who has the lowest of LSAT scores can get into SOME law school. The problem is they will not likely have a legal job after graduation. To this day, I still don't understand folks that go to low ranked law schools.

if the law school admission process in HK is even slightly more competitive (vis a vis US medical school process), then I thinK HK is in better shape

Not just admissions, but the entire legal education and placement system is outdated. Medical school has STEP testing that weeds out students throughout school; law school is pretty much just regular classes and grading. Medical training involves internships and residency programs that develop real world experience; very few law schools have even applied pilot programs to get students anything but summer internships. Then upon graduation, because lawyers cannot share profits with non-lawyers, there are very few institutional positions available for lawyers by comparison to hospital and clinic based jobs for doctors.

Agreed. It's not an individual institution problem; it's a problem with the whole of the legal education system. Plus, three years of pure academia is not necessary or particularly useful in developing legal knowledge and skills. But innovation is likely to dissuade prospective students who don't know jack about the practice of law and are primarily looking at rankings, location, and cost.

The only way to fix the system is systemic change involving ABA accreditation standards and the licensing boards of a majority of jurisdictions. That kind of systemic change doesn't come easy or overnight, and with political and economic attacks on the judiciary and bar, is probably impractical at this time.

Well especially for people that started law school in 2008/2009 and got scholarships to lower-tiered law schools it made total sense. After their 3 years in law school many are questioning why they wasted their time. Hindsight is 20/20 and the future is certainly hard to predict.

This is it exactly. The one positive as of late is that people are finally starting to understand that going to law school is generally not a sound proposition. Administration of the LSAT is down something like 10-15% over the past two years, implying that people are starting to get the message. Because this number is down, the applicant pool is suddenly less qualified than it was a few years back, and top tier schools have responded by cutting class size to maintain their LSAT and GPA medians for purposes of USNWR rankings.

Unfortunately, the bottom tier schools have not taken similar action, and many have actually expanded their class size. The dean of some horrid degree mill even had the gaul to post an op-ed in the NYT a few weeks back to encourage young people to continue enrolling. Neglecting to mention that third and fourth tier schools place maybe 25% of their graduates into jobs requiring a law degree, he went on to tout law school as this wonderful beacon of higher learning that universally leads to great opportunity and career advancement.

LSAT scores fall along a bell curve. While the top 10% will always score 163+, the absolute number of applicants in that top 10% will depend on the total number of test-takers. With fewer people taking the LSAT, that pie has gotten smaller.

Say in Year 1 there are 1,000 people who take the exam. If the top 10% is a 163+, then 100 people will fall in that score range. In this scenario, assume that Schools A, B, C are the top three schools, and to maintain a median LSAT of at least 163+ they divy the 100 students up. Each school then has a class size of 33 students. If one wishes to admit more students, it will have to dip into the pool of those with lower LSAT scores.

If in Year 2 there are only 500 people who take the exam, then only 50 people will get a 163+. Now Schools A, B, and C can each only take 17 students if they wish to keep their median LSAT steady. Conversely, it can keep its class size at 33 but only by admitting less qualified students. Since this would lower the school's LSAT median, it would ultimately cause the school to lose ground in the USNWR rankings. The whole law school game is based on the USNWR ranking, so schools will do everything they can to shed students and solidify their all-mighty ranking.

This example is imperfect, because in reality the schools at the very top will always be fine. However, any school ranked below, say, the T10 will really start to feel the pinch of a dwindling pool of strong candidates to choose from. I am in my last year at a T30, and in the past three years my school's LSAT median has dropped three LSAT points, even as it cut each class size. I predict that the median will increase by one point this year and that last year (current 1L class) was an aberration, but it will never again be in the high 160s as it was when I applied.

I think another factor is electronic discovery tools have gotten much better. Instead of hiring a bunch of new grads to go through the handtrucks stacked with documents, more and more firms are using services that will scan/ocr/index documents or do the same with electronic document dumps.

With the recession, firms looked to cut costs where they could, and people are more expensive than software/services. So firms are hiring fewer first year associates to do doc review. Which saves them the trouble of firing the "non partner track" associates after 2 years just to begin the cycle again.

Probably not as important as shrinking businesses due to the recession and more grads/schools, but e-discovery has been a big deal.

The rise of E-discovery is an issue too but now what they do here in NYC is hire a bunch of lawyers at $30 an hour to do doc review in shifts. Even with the software, you need people reviewing things for privilege and responsiveness. But instead of billing the client $200 an hour for a junior associate, it's a small fraction of that for a freelancer.

Move to Canada. The Canadian legal market is much healthier and if you are fluent in Cantonese, the Vancouver legal market is your oyster. If you have any Mandarin at all, you've opened up opportunities in AB oil and gas, and in Ontario. We're seeing a huge number of Chinese acquisitions of junior miners.